Deep
within the National Security Agency, an elite, rarely discussed team of
hackers and spies is targeting America’s enemies abroad.

BY MATTHEW M. AID | JUNE 10, 2013

Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), Fort Meade, Maryland

This
weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings
with China’s newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two
leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour — cyber-espionage — a
subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now
front and center with the revelations of sweeping U.S. data mining. The
media has focused at length on China’s aggressive attempts to
electronically steal U.S. military and commercial secrets, but Xi pushed
back at the “shirt-sleeves” summit, noting that China, too, was the
recipient of cyber-espionage. But what Obama probably neglected to
mention is that he has his own hacker army, and it has burrowed its way
deep, deep into China’s networks.

When
the agenda for the meeting at the Sunnylands estate outside Palm
Springs, California, was agreed to several months ago, both parties
agreed that it would be a nice opportunity for President Xi, who assumed
his post in March, to discuss a wide range of security and economic
issues of concern to both countries. According to diplomatic sources,
the issue of cybersecurity was not one of the key topics to
be discussed at the summit. Sino-American economic relations, climate
change, and the growing threat posed by North Korea were supposed to
dominate the discussions.

Then,
two weeks ago, White House officials leaked to the press that Obama
intended to raise privately with Xi the highly contentious issue of
China’s widespread use of computer hacking to steal U.S. government,
military, and commercial secrets. According to a Chinese diplomat in
Washingtonwho spoke in confidence, Beijing was furious about the
sudden elevation of cybersecurity and Chinese espionage on the
meeting’s agenda. According to a diplomatic source in Washington, the
Chinese government was even angrier that the White House leaked the new
agenda item to the press before Washington bothered to tell Beijing
about it.

So
the Chinese began to hit back. Senior Chinese officials have publicly
accused the U.S. government of hypocrisy and have alleged that
Washington is also actively engaged in cyber-espionage. When the latest
allegation of Chinese cyber-espionage was leveled in late May in a
front-page Washington Postarticle,
which alleged that hackers employed by the Chinese military had stolen
the blueprints of over three dozen American weapons systems, the Chinese
government’s top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, shot back that
Beijing possessed “mountains of data” showing that the United States
has engaged in widespread hacking designed to steal Chinese government
secrets. This weekend’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s
PRISM and Verizon metadata collection from a 29-year-old former CIA
undercover operative named Edward J. Snowden, who is now living in Hong
Kong, only add fuel to Beijing’s position.

But
Washington never publicly responded to Huang’s allegation, and nobody
in the U.S. media seems to have bothered to ask the White House if there
is a modicum of truth to the Chinese charges.

It
turns out that the Chinese government’s allegations are essentially
correct. According to a number of confidential sources, a highly
secretive unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S.
government’s huge electronic eavesdropping organization, called the
Office ofTailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully
penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15
years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence
information about what is going on inside the People’s Republic of
China.

Hidden
away inside the massive NSA headquarters complex at Fort Meade,
Maryland, in a large suite of offices segregated from the rest of the
agency, TAO is a mystery to many NSA employees. Relatively few NSA
officials have complete access to information about TAO because of the
extraordinary sensitivity of its operations, and it requires a special
security clearance to gain access to the unit’s work spaces inside the
NSA operations complex. The door leading to its ultramodern operations
center is protected by armed guards, an imposing steel door that can
only be entered by entering the correct six-digit code into a keypad,
and a retinal scanner to ensure that only those individuals specially
cleared for access get through the door.

According
to former NSA officials interviewed for this article, TAO’s mission is
simple. It collects intelligence information on foreign targets by
surreptitiously hacking into their computers and telecommunications
systems, cracking passwords, compromising the computer security systems
protecting the targeted computer, stealing the data stored on computer
hard drives, and then copying all the messages and data traffic passing
within the targeted email and text-messaging systems. The technical term
of art used by NSA to describe these operations is computer network
exploitation (CNE).

TAO
is also responsible for developing the information that would allow the
United States to destroy or damage foreign computer and
telecommunications systems with a cyberattack if so directed by the
president. The organization responsible for conducting such a
cyberattack is U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), whose headquarters is
located at Fort Meade and whose chief is the director of the NSA, Gen.
Keith Alexander.

Commanded since April of this year by Robert Joyce,
who formerly was the deputy director of the NSA’s Information Assurance
Directorate (responsible for protecting the U.S. government’s
communications and computer systems), TAO, sources say, is now the
largest and arguably the most important component of the NSA’s huge
Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) Directorate, consisting of over 1,000
military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting
specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical
engineers.

The sanctum sanctorumof
TAO is its ultramodern operations center at Fort Meade called the
Remote Operations Center (ROC), which is where the unit’s 600 or so
military and civilian computer hackers (they themselves CNE operators)
work in rotating shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

These
operators spend their days (or nights) searching the ether for
computers systems and supporting telecommunications networks being
utilized by, for example, foreign terrorists to pass messages to their
members or sympathizers. Once these computers have been identified and
located, the computer hackers working in the ROC break into the targeted
computer systems electronically using special software designed by
TAO’s own corps of software designers and engineers specifically for
this purpose, download the contents of the computers’ hard drives, and
place software implants or other devices called “buggies” inside the
computers’ operating systems, which allows TAO intercept operators at
Fort Meade to continuously monitor the email and/or text-messaging
traffic coming in and out of the computers or hand-held devices.

TAO’s
work would not be possible without the team of gifted computer
scientists and software engineers belonging to the Data Network
Technologies Branch, who develop the sophisticated computer software
that allows the unit’s operators to perform their intelligence
collection mission. A separate unitwithin TAO called the
Telecommunications Network Technologies Branch (TNT) develops the
techniques that allow TAO’s hackers to covertly gain access to targeted
computer systems and telecommunications networks without being detected.
Meanwhile, TAO’s Mission Infrastructure Technologies Branch develops
and builds the sensitive computer and telecommunications monitoring
hardware and support infrastructure that keeps the effort up and
running.

TAO
even has its own small clandestine intelligence-gathering unit called
the Access Technologies Operations Branch, which includes personnel
seconded by the CIA and the FBI, who perform what are described as
“off-net operations,” which is a polite way of saying that they arrange
for CIA agents to surreptitiously plant eavesdropping devices on
computers and/or telecommunications systems overseas so that TAO’s
hackers can remotely access them from Fort Meade.

It
is important to note that TAO is not supposed to work against domestic
targets in the United States or its possessions. This is the
responsibility of the FBI, which is the sole U.S. intelligence agency
chartered for domestic telecommunications surveillance. But in light of
information aboutwider NSA snooping,
one has to prudently be concerned about whether TAO is able to perform
its mission of collecting foreign intelligence without accessing
communications originating in or transiting through the United States.

Since
its creation in 1997, TAO has garnered a reputation for producing some
of the best intelligence available to the U.S. intelligence community
not only about China, but also on foreign terrorist groups, espionage
activities being conducted against the United States by foreign
governments, ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction
developments around the globe, and the latest political, military, and
economic developments around the globe.

According
to a former NSA official, by 2007 TAO’s 600 intercept operators were
secretly tapping into thousands of foreign computer systems and
accessing password-protected computer hard drives and emails of targets
around the world. As detailed in my 2009 history of NSA, The Secret Sentry,
this highly classified intercept program, known at the time as
Stumpcursor, proved to be critically important during the U.S. Army’s
2007 “surge” in Iraq, where it was credited with single-handedly
identifying and locating over 100 Iraqi and al Qaeda insurgent cells in
and around Baghdad. That same year, sources report that TAO was given an
award for producing particularly important intelligence information
about whether Iran was trying to build an atomic bomb.

By
the time Obama became president of the United States in January 2009,
TAO had become something akin to the wunderkind of the U.S. intelligence
community. “It’s become an industry unto itself,” a former NSA official
said of TAO at the time. “They go places and get things that nobody
else in the IC [intelligence community] can.”

Given
the nature and extraordinary political sensitivity of its work, it will
come as no surprise that TAO has always been, and remains,
extraordinarily publicity shy. Everything about TAO is classified top
secret codeword, even within the hypersecretive NSA. Its name has
appeared in print only a few times over the past decade, and the handful
of reporters who have dared inquire about it have been politely but
very firmly warned by senior U.S. intelligence officials not to describe
its work for fear that it might compromise its ongoing efforts.
According to a senior U.S. defense official who is familiar with TAO’s
work, “The agency believes that the less people know about them [TAO]
the better.”

The
word among NSA officials is that if you want to get promoted or
recognized, get a transfer to TAO as soon as you can. The current head
of the NSA’s SIGINT Directorate, Teresa Shea, 54, got her current job in
large part because of the work she did as chief of TAO in the years
after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the unit earned plaudits for its
ability to collect extremely hard-to-come-by information during the
latter part of George W. Bush’s administration. We do not know what the
information was, but sources suggest that it must have been pretty
important to propel Shea to her position today. But according to a
recently retired NSA official, TAO “is the place to be right now.”

There’s
no question that TAO has continued to grow in size and importance since
Obama took office in 2009, which is indicative of its outsized role. In
recent years, TAO’s collection operations have expanded from Fort Meade
to some of the agency’s most important listening posts in the United
States. There are now mini-TAO units operating at the huge NSA SIGINT
intercept and processing centers at NSA Hawaii at Wahiawa on the island
of Oahu; NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Georgia; and NSA Texas at the
Medina Annex outside San Antonio, Texas; and within the huge NSA
listening post at Buckley Air Force Base outside Denver.

The
problem is that TAO has become so large and produces so much valuable
intelligence information that it has become virtually impossible to hide
it anymore. The Chinese government is certainly aware of TAO’s
activities. The “mountains of data” statement by China’s top Internet
official, Huang Chengqing, is clearly an implied threat by Beijing to
release this data. Thus it is unlikely that President Obama pressed
President Xi too hard at the Sunnydale summit on the question of China’s
cyber-espionage activities. As any high-stakes poker player knows, you
can only press your luck so far when the guy on the other side of the
table knows what cards you have in your hand.

THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images

Tailored Access Operations

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tailored Access Operations (TAO) is a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA).
TAO identifies, monitors, infiltrates, and gathers intelligence on
computer systems being used by entities hostile to the United States.[1][2][3][4]

In an anonymous interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, former US officials stated the unit uses automated hacking software to harvest approximately two petabytes of data per hour which is largely processed automatically.[3]